While we watched Digg stumble from their perch in 2010 upon the release of their new interface, another popular social link sharing website Reddit, saw traffic numbers increase by more than 230% from January through December.
Reddit announced January 2010 pageviews of 250 million, while December pageviews brought in 829 million views. If you’re doing the math, that’s a 231.6% increase in just 12 months.
Adding insult to Digg injury, Reddit execs also announced that the average “time spent on site” stats have vastly improved, from 12 minutes and 41 seconds in January to 15 minutes and 21 seconds in December.
To put Reddit’s meteoric rise into perspective, Digg in July received 200 million pageviews with many indicators pointing to a shrinking user base that appears to be working in Reddit’s favor.
It also appears that Reddit growth has no plans of slowing, the company recently increased the number of servers they are running from 50 to 119, while memory capacity was bumped from 16TB to 48TB and delivery capacity was pushed form 10.1 trillion bytes to 44.4 trillion. read more
It’s no secret that Reddit (considered by many to be Digg’s biggest rival) has not not fared well after being acquired by Condé Nast, it’s current parent company.
Between the hack attempts and the lack of corporate support, it’s very clear to the geekverse that Reddit is the red headed step child of Condé Nast (pun not intended) and under its current leadership the site could become extinct through neglect.
However there is a glimmer of hope for the zealous community as Ben Huh of the Cheezeburger Network has offered to take Reddit under his wing (and yes he is serious about the offer).
Hi TDWers, I’m Ben Huh, and I run the Cheezburger Network (which includes The Daily What, if you were too Prop 19’d to notice). I have made this offer privately to a few people associated with Reddit, and I’ll say it publicly now:
I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much.
Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.
Cheers,
Ben Huh.
Although a marriage between Reddit and Cheezeburger might sound strange (as Cheezeburger emphasizes images while Reddit is more of a geek community), there are actually 4 reasons why these two odd sites would compliment each other. read more
On the Reddit blog today the social web sharing site announced that their [email protected] account had been hacked, adding that the account is used only for feedback e-mail, thus no confidential data was compromised. Reddit is now using [email protected] as their official e-mail for the time being.
Reddit released the following statement via their blog:
“We’re in contact with both google’s and twitter’s security team, and the site has not been broken into. All he’s done at this point is ruined everyone’s night. We don’t recycle passwords, and we don’t store passwords in the reddit email. No one’s account has been compromised. We don’t store any confidential information in that account; it is just for feedback email.”
The part about the team contacting Twitter was added because their official Twitter account was also compromised leading to fake Tweets being added to their account. The fake Tweets have now been removed.
Linking directly to individual pages on a Web site instead of the home page, also known as “Deep Linking”, is a staple of blogging and the Internet in general. It is used as a means to reference sources, forward interesting articles and, generally, get information out there on the Web.
Without deep linking, social news would likely not exist, many Web 2.0 services (such as Delicious) would have to close and even Google would have to drastically change the way it operates. The Web would, almost overnight, become a much more difficult to use and less efficient place.
Though the lawsuit is clearly misguided in some ways, including the claim that the site loses advertising over deep linking, it is worth taking a quick moment to look at some of the potential legal hazards that come with deep linking and how to avoid them. read more
For most bloggers, finding story ideas is one of the hardest parts of maintaining a blog and it is something that becomes increasingly important important, though much more difficult, the more topical your site is.
Fortunately, the Web provides many great ways to keep on top of what is going on in your field, if you know how to use the tools that are available.
For me, the trick has never been to find the one best way to get new story ideas, but to but open up a wide variety of communication lines. Though my system is not perfect and I continue to miss stories from time to time, I also have a backlog of about three weeks forth of topics in my notebook.
That is because finding story ideas, for most niches, is fairly simple. It is just a matter of knowing where to look. read more
While my blogs have experienced some community link love, I’ve never been fortunate enough to have the Digg-effect overload my server like a Ritalin kid on crack sugar. I can tell you that one social site that has never sent me an iota of traffic is Reddit. Perhaps their algorithms simply don’t like me – or maybe my content just sucks. I’ll let you decide.
Showing my objective-nature, I will not hold a grudge and will tell you about Reddit’s much-needed, well overdue redesign (the first such change since 2005).
The gang at Mashable have outlined the notable changes:
- The top navigation bar has been re-styled, and now includes a link to the site’s “most controversial” stories (stories with both a lot of up and down votes).
- On the right, you can now customize Reddit based on the topics you want aggregated on your homepage. Just check and un-check the categories you want included/removed.
- Links for creating your own Reddit and submitting a link to the site are much more obvious (also on the right sidebar)
- Story links have been re-styled – it’s not a dramatic change, but it’s easier on the eyes and includes links to comments, saving, hiding, and reporting.
One thing is dramatically clear: Reddit is easier on the eyes. Since I don’t expect the site to suddenly fall in love with my content, I’ll chalk this up to putting some makeup on an average looking woman.
Has anyone out there ever experienced a bump in traffic from Reddit?
Here’s a list of ideas I’ve had over the past year or so while using social news sites. Most of them are ideas that I think would improve sites like Digg, Netscape and Reddit in one way or another. Admittedly, one or two of them would just be interesting to see implemented on an experimental level. Either way, feel free to rip each and every one to bits.
The principle of transparency is regarded by many to be necessary in a successful democracy. Every day, people are demanding more transparency out of the media, business and government. Socially driven news sites are a step in that direction. They offer a level playing field where users come to edit news democratically. What role does transparency play in the users’ actions on these sites?
On Friday, The Huffington Post quietly slid their foot in the door of socially driven news by launching a public beta of HuffIt. Insert obligatory glue-huffing joke here. read more
With a new year comes new opportunities and a chance to set goals for the year to come. Here is a grab-bag of new year’s resolutions for Netscapers, Diggers, Redditers, etc. If everyone took on a couple of these, the world of socially driven news would be a better place by the end of 2007. read more
While we watched Digg stumble from their perch in 2010 upon the release of their new interface, another popular social link sharing website Reddit, saw traffic numbers increase by more than 230% from January through December.
